First published in 1969, ‘Killing No Murder’ is a provocative and stimulating study dedicated to the memory of the tens of millions of war dead who, since the author’s birth, have sacrificed their lives for the score of leaders who might, at the cost of their own, have saved them. When should we or must we kill a politician? Churchill is said to have refused to sanction the assassination of Hitler—was he right to consider aerial bombing a more acceptable way of dealing with Nazism? If a racist, populist, wilfully ignorant, narcissistic, cynically scapegoating, truth-twisting and irredeemably self-serving and apparently irremovable political leader emerges, paving the way to civil strife, the breakdown of the social fabric, xenophobia, the dictatorship and possibly war — when, if ever, can we appeal to justice and common sense? How useful or ethical is assassination or tyrannicide as an expression of domestic or foreign policy? Edward Hyams here considers two classes: socially or politically motivated assassinations, and assassinations designed to advance or protect the interests of oppressed peoples. By what right do assassins judge, condemn and execute their victims? Is it the same right that legitimises the murder by politicians, air force and drone pilots of innocent civilians along with a randomly and arbitrarily selected adversary? Can a society that condones war morally condemn assassination? The conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq have shown, time and time again, how it is the ordinary man, woman and child, caught in the crossfire of the paranoid fantasies of political leaders, who suffer as a consequence. Would it not be logical and in the widest human interests if assassination could be accepted as a legitimate and highly preferable alternative to war itself ? These questions are central to the conclusions drawn in Edward Hyams’s book.

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Anarchism

Anarchism swept us away completely, because it demanded everything of us and promised everything to us. There was no remote corner of life that it did not illumine ... or so it seemed to us ... shot though with contradictions, fragmented into varieties and sub-varieties, anarchism demanded, before anything else, harmony between deeds and words
- Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary